In Argentina, Access to Water, Electricity Defunded for Low-Income ...

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA — A massive program to provide basic services, including running water and sewage pipes, to informally settled, low-income neighborhoods in this city and throughout the country has slowed — and in some cases, stopped entirely.

Money for the program was disbursed on schedule until late last year, when President Javier Milei took office and implemented a series of austerity measures. Among the measures was a drastic reduction in funding for the Urban Social Integration program, which oversees the projects to provide basic services in low-income neighborhoods known as barrios populares.

The organizations that manage the projects say they don’t know when they’ll be completed, if at all. Argentina’s proposed 2025 budget doesn’t include the money needed to wrap up the work.

Meanwhile, more than 850,000 people across the country await the basic services the program promised. About 25,000 people from the cooperatives engaged to do the work have lost their jobs, according to data provided by the Mesa Nacional de Barrios Populares, a national organization that represents the interests of those neighborhoods.

The consequences are dire.

“Families get sick because they don’t have potable water,” says Guillermina Storch, a leader of Mesa Nacional de Barrios Populares. “Houses catch fire because the transformers were only operating with informal connections.”

The Center of Legal and Social Studies filed a legal action to force the state to resume work in one neighborhood, as well as reverse the decree that drastically cut funding. The legal action has since expanded to a national level, allowing residents in any neighborhood where work halted to join. It’s still moving through the court system.

The Secretariat of Territorial Development, Habitat and Housing, the division that oversees the Urban Social Integration fund, did not agree to an interview with Global Press Journal for this article. However, a representative of the secretariat texted a GPJ reporter in mid-June stating that the funds now require approval from the Ministry of Economy before they’re disbursed.

Before the change, the undersecretary of the Urban Social Integration approved funding. The trust isn’t part of the national budget and, in theory, can’t be repurposed. It’s financed largely by taxes on purchases made in foreign countries and some domestic spending, as well as by a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank.

Milei’s austerity measures cut funding to the Urban Social Integration program by 96% — from 35 billion Argentine pesos (about 35 million United States dollars) per month to 2 billion pesos (about 2 million dollars) per month – despite guidelines meant to reserve it specifically for capital improvements in low-income neighborhoods.

Sebastián Pareja, the Urban Social Integration undersecretary, said on X (formerly known as Twitter) in October that 137 of more than 700 stalled projects will be completed by the end of the year. Leaders at Mesa Nacional de Barrios Populares are skeptical. If the funds had been disbursed as originally planned, they say, all of the projects would be done.

“I made a promise to these people,” says Marcela Vargas, a coordinator of Somos Barrios de Pie in the El Tambo neighborhood of Buenos Aires Province, where about 80 families await basic services. “Now, having to tell them we won’t be able to do it is awful for everyone.”

Others see the cuts as necessary — and even obvious — solutions to problems plaguing the country.

Inflation is the real issue, says Eduardo Vukajlovic, 49, who has worked in his family’s pasta factory since he was 16 years old.

“Printing money that is useless so that the next month I have to increase [the price of] things twice as much does not help either,” he says. “Those who have less are suffering more and more.”

As for the Urban Social Integration projects, Vukajlovic says, each municipality should take responsibility for its own problems.

“Why should I, who live in Caballito, have to help someone who lives in La Matanza?” he says, referring to a neighborhood of the City of Buenos Aires and a municipality in its outskirts.

No electricity, no water

Water access and other basic services have always been a problem for barrios populares, neighborhoods established in the 1930s on vacant land by people in need of housing.

The government saw these settlements, then known as villas, as an interim solution: temporary homes that residents would vacate when their economic situations improved. Instead, the neighborhoods remained in place — and grew. Throughout the 20th century, Argentina’s leaders grappled with whether to eradicate or integrate the neighborhoods, even as residents protested their living conditions and demanded improvements, says María Mercedes Di Virgilio, a social scientist focused on urban studies at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council.

In 1963, the first organization to represent the neighborhoods successfully secured infrastructure for water and power lines, as well as schools and health care centers. But the coming decades brought a series of dramatic changes to Argentina’s government, including multiple military coups, which resulted in evictions and on-and-off support for new homes and basic services.

Toward the end of the 1980s, a paradigm shift in Argentina led to a resurgence of support for the barrios populares, and the government granted land ownership to residents. In 1995, initiatives to improve infrastructure and services gained momentum.

The Urban Social Integration program was established in 2018 to provide the 10% of Argentina’s population that live in the nation’s nearly 6,500 barrios populares access to basic services, public facilities, social rights and housing security. The program suspended evictions in those neighborhoods, launched infrastructure and public works projects, and required that at least a quarter of the workforce on those projects be from the neighborhoods themselves.

Now, those involved with the projects say they worry the government’s decree was the first step toward dismantling what they’ve advocated for over decades.

“It’s not fair after so many years of fighting for it,” says Viviana Oscari, a representative of Somos Barrios de Pie of La Matanza.

Austerity and the “scourge of inflation”

Milei has repeatedly defended his administration’s budget cuts as a tool to achieve fiscal balance. And Pareja, the Urban Social Integration undersecretary, said in October on X, “We are going to put an end to the scourge of inflation once and for all!”

Many Argentines support them.

Without changes, “it’s the same old story and Argentina ends up being a country in chaos,” says Hernán Carrol, president of Somos Libertarios La Matanza, an association of libertarians in La Matanza.

“There is always a certain part of society that ends up suffering more than others from this type of process,” Carrol says. “The goal is to achieve a zero fiscal deficit, and for that, you have to make adjustments.”

Argentina must take action to get out of the inflation spiral, Di Virgilio says, but stopping public works projects is the wrong approach.

“You do not get out of this situation with these types of measures, which might mean inflation stops in the short term but have an incredibly negative impact on the population’s quality of life,” she says.

When the government doesn’t provide basic services, poverty rates go up, Di Virgilio says. The lack of running water and other infrastructure plays the biggest role in creating barriers to social mobility for future generations, she says, and it costs the most to reverse.

Fernanda Miño, former secretary of the Urban Social Integration program, says the government’s stance is clear: “They are proposing another model for the country, with the poor on the outside.”

Families in limbo

The completed improvement projects have changed lives.

For Daniela Guanuco, who lives in Danubio Azul, a barrio popular in the Buenos Aires area, it means safety and peace of mind. At the end of 2023, an unsecured electrical connection started a fire in her bedroom.

“Everything was loose. The power went out constantly. Last time, it caught fire,” she says. “I have two small children. I was alone. I had to talk to one of my neighbors to get help.”

Guanuco’s house was one of the last five that the cooperative working in the neighborhood connected before the budget cut, says Mauricio Escobar, a member of Somos Barrios de Pie and head of the infrastructure projects in the neighborhood.

The plan was to connect 120 families in the first stage of the project and another 130 in the second stage, he says. They completed 84 electrical connections before funds stopped arriving. He doesn’t think the second stage will come to fruition.

“There are many people who need work,” Escobar says.

In 2023, 66-year-old construction worker Juan Carlos Vega worked for the cooperative that installed electrical connections in Danubio Azul. Vega has worked with Somos Barrios de Pie for 11 years on maintenance and integration projects in his neighborhood, including such activities as sweeping, paving and painting schools and health care centers.

“No one was hiring me because I was over 50 years old, and here they accepted me with open arms,” he says. “It’s the only job I found.”

Now, he’s unemployed.

El Tambo resident Gerónima Saldivar, 78, was looking forward to receiving a water connection for her house. Installation was scheduled to begin earlier this year, but it never happened. The cooperative stopped receiving government funds before it reached her house, she says. Until work resumes, Saldivar must continue to carry buckets of water from her son’s house nearby to cook, clean and bathe.

“The water is a disaster. It doesn’t come to my house,” she says. “I’ve been waiting for two years.”